Nocturnes

2062; 2013

Find it at:

Definitive work can cast a long shadow. It's to William Basinski's credit that he hasn't let the weight of his most lauded piece, The Disintegration Loops, overwhelm him. He still appears proud of that album, releasing an expanded box-set edition last year, bolstering its reputation instead of shirking from it. It's essentially become a living, breathing thing. Letting The Disintegration Loops take a back seat never felt like much of an option for Basinski anyway. A large part of that album's narrative was spun out of his real-world struggles with his art, triggered by the financial woes he was undergoing prior to its release. The rush of people toward it must have provoked a strong sense of freedom and validation-- not easy emotions to forget, and ones that were presumably not taken for granted by someone in Basinski's circumstance.

His return to The Disintegration Loops also tied into Basinski's ever evolving relationship with his own past, as witnessed by the frequent reworkings of his older material. Nocturnes is his first new solo recording in four years, but the 40-minute-long title track is a return to a tape and prepared piano piece recorded in his San Francisco period circa 1979-80. The second of the two tracks dates back to 2009, parts of which featured in Robert Wilson's opera, The Life and Death of Marina Abramović. Things don't get left behind in Basinski's world, they carry on mutating as the years pass, provoking questions about where things begin and end. "I have a weird way of living in time," he said in an Update interview in 2012. "I just try to stay in the eternal present."

Both Nocturnes tracks are wrinkle-free. Immaculate, even. There's nothing that suggests an era in which they might have been recorded. No trace of a dusty old reel-to-reel tape machine, no dated recording techniques. Basinski's relationship to time is key, especially on "Nocturnes", where it's easy to lose track of how long its slow-moving loops have been gently rotating around one another. Somehow, Basinski has mastered how to keep material like this interesting, slowly fading in changes, just doing enough to make it immersive. This isn't exactly the "eternal present" he refers to-- instead, it feels more like an attempt to manipulate time, to see how malleable its boundaries can be. Seconds pass like weeks, minutes turn into seconds. Often it's hard to tell whether you're at the end or in the middle. Ultimately, those distinctions don't really matter.

The only part of the overall work that takes you out of the moment is in the transition from one track to the other. Initially, the switch is jarring, resembling an alarm clock sounding at a particular inopportune moment in a dream. "Nocturnes" is all muddy, languid movement; "The Trail of Tears" has a coarser, more agile feel. The latter is a lesser work, making an awkward fit in an album that may have benefitted from containing just one track. "Nocturnes" siphons its beauty from the slow-release journey that Basinski instills in it. By contrast, "The Trail of Tears" starts by resembling a paint-cracked old rocking chair creaking into infinity, only to drift into a wash of ambient mush. It tilts toward total escapism, taking on a dream-like state. But Basinski's best work isn’t positioned there; he's better when fusing the otherworldly with the real. On "Nocturnes", abstract thoughts become one with the music, forming a place so tangible you can almost reach out and touch it.